in one in peacetime, though he has sat inside several parked on the ground, impersonating passengers in TV airline commercials. He is a man of great resilience and resourcefulness, who overcame a disadvantaged background and adjusted deftly to changing circumstances. A natural but largely untutored violinist as a youth, he left school at fourteen to work as an office boy, was turned on by jazz, a kind of music not hospitable to the violin (Stéphane Grappelli excepted), taught himself to play the saxophone and clarinet, supplemented his office-job earnings by playing in dance bands in the evenings, went professional, played in nightclubs, orchestra pits, radio big bands, sang ballads on the air in a sweet high tenor voice that suited the taste of the Thirties, came back from the war to find crooners were all the rage, blew the dust off his violin when Mantovani made the instrument popular again, played palm-court background music for banquets and wedding receptions, learned to play reels for hunt balls, and had a regular job with a quartet of his own in a West End nightclub for several years. When the club closed and he tried to get back into doing gigs he found they were few and far between, so acquired an Equity card and an agent to find him work as a TV and film extra in the daytime. He still catches glimpses of himself on television occasionally in repeats of very old sitcoms and rings me up to ask if I saw him, and I always pretend that I did.
He has also been a man with many other interests - serially. At different periods of his life he always had some hobby or recreation which consumed all his spare time and energy until he would suddenly lose interest in it and let it lapse, sometimes returning to it years later. For a long period it was golf - a convenient recreation for a man who worked in the evenings and was free in the weekday afternoons when municipal courses are uncrowded - but try as he might, practising for hours and studying golf manuals, he could never get his handicap down into single figures, and eventually his knees began to trouble him and he gave up the game. Then it was sea angling, taking day trips to Brighton to fish off the West Pier until it burned down, a disaster that upset him deeply and seemed to crush his enthusiasm for the pastime.Then it was collecting antiques, trawling through the local second-hand stores and flea markets for promising-looking small objects (there was no room in the house for large ones) and poring over library books in an effort to date and value them. Then it was dealing in stocks and shares. Then it was calligraphy.Then it was oil painting. He invariably taught himself these various skills from library books and magazines, or cadged advice and information from more experienced practitioners. The idea of, for instance, joining a painting class was anathema to him. He was an instinctive autodidact. Perhaps for this reason he never really excelled either as a musician or in any of his leisure activities, but I take my hat off to his professional versatility and the range of his enthusiasms, beside which my own life seems dull and narrowly specialised.
All the more poignant, then, is it to contemplate him now, stripped of all these life-enhancing interests. He has only one hobby these days: saving money, observing prices, economising on food, clothing and household bills. It’s no use asking him what he is saving the money for, or pointing out that if he drew more deeply on his assets he would be very unlikely to exhaust them, and that in such a contingency I would provide whatever funds were necessary. Indeed he is apt to take such comments as unfeeling hints that he hasn’t got much longer to live - which is of course, in actuarial terms, true, but not what I mean to convey. One of the reasons I selfishly let him drowse on in his armchair was the consciousness that we hadn’t yet touched on this sensitive area, and the less time there was available to do so before I had to leave, the better. I knew that the drawers of the bureau desk behind my back were stuffed with a disordered collection of old bills and bank statements, tax forms and share certificates and National Savings certificates, chequebook stubs and paying-in books and building society passbooks